From Seville
The Spanish extreme right it is no longer satisfied with conditioning the conservative governments to which it provides parliamentary support from the outside. Now demands to touch power and Castilla y León, the largest region in Spain and one of the most affected by the constant process of depopulation in the interior, She is on her way to being one of them.
Regional elections were held last Sunday in that community, governed for more than 30 years by the Popular Party, and Vox, which in 2019 had won only one seat, multiplied its support to become the third political force with 13 deputies. Your support is essential for the conservative Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, of the PP, to continue as head of the regional government. The national president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, has already set a price: he demands that his own enter the executive.
The irruption in Andalusia
The extreme right broke into Spanish politics in the Andalusian regional elections, held in December 2018, when it surprisingly won 12 of the 105 seats in the regional parliament. On that occasion, his support was also necessary to invest a candidate from the Popular Party as president, the first non-socialist in the most populous region of Spain since the establishment of autonomy in 1981.
Vox chose to support the investiture, provide parliamentary support to the new government and condition it from the outside. After that irruption, every time the opportunity arose, he opted for similar models in municipal and regional governments: parliamentary support for right-wing governments but without becoming part of the government.
Now riding a wave of growing support, Abascal -who promotes a European alliance with other ultra leaders such as the Hungarian president Viktos Orban- is willing to make a qualitative leap and he puts a higher price: he wants to place his pawns in the regional governments.
Abascal’s maneuver might sound contradictory, since his party denies the State of Autonomies, the decentralized form of government that Spain endowed itself with the 1978 Constitution, and aspires to return to the centralized State that disappeared with the dictator Francisco Franco . The autonomies, with their fundamental powers such as health, education, justice, public works or culture, represent in the incendiary speech of Vox the expression of all the ills that affect Spain, but they are, at the same time, an incomparable opportunity to accumulate power and financing for his great objective: to enter the government of Spain when the elections are held. general elections at the end of 2023.
The PP, between a rock and a hard place
Vox’s demand, which has already announced that the first thing it will do from the government will be to repeal the regional laws of Historical Memory and once morest sexist violence, puts the Popular Party between a rock and a hard place. Although in Spain the culture of not agreeing with the extreme right in force in countries like Germany or France is far from entrenched, an eventual coalition government with Vox, even if it were at the regional level, would be a blow to the prestige of the PP in Europe. Some of the theses of the extreme right – such as climate change denialism, euroscepticism, the criminalization of immigrants or the denial of already consolidated rights such as abortion or equal marriage – are unacceptable to most liberals and conservatives Europeans.
In addition, in the PP there is the fear that an entry of Vox in the regional governments, with the Andalusian elections already on the horizon, will become a stimulus for left-wing voters that blocks the change in the political cycle with which they dream for next year.
But on the other hand, they understand that with the collapse of Ciudadanos, the liberal formation with which they have had pacts but which is disintegrating as elections are held, they have no choice but to come to terms with Vox. How far they are willing to give is now the great dilemma they will have to resolve.
At the moment, they face this dilemma with internal differences. The national president, Pablo Casado, refuses to sign a government pact with Vox and demands that Fernández Mañueco first reach an agreement with the provincial parties and then request the abstention of the extreme right in the vote for the investiture of the president. For the national leaders of the PP, the most benefited from a government pact with Vox would be the Socialists, who would have thick ammunition to attack them in the next electoral processes.
The candidate, however, refuses to rule out outright a government agreement with the extreme right and claims his competence to make decisions with autonomy in Castilla y León.
Against Fernández Mañueco, he weighs having shown himself to be an unfortunate strategist. Until two months ago he governed placidly in coalition with the liberals of Ciudadanos and decided to force the rupture of the pact to call early elections in which he aspired to obtain an absolute majority by absorbing the voters of his allies. Ciudadanos, as planned, sank electorally but their votes did not go to the PP, but to Vox. Unnecessarily, Fernández Mañueco got his party into a problem that he now doesn’t know how to get out of.